The Last Life (25 page)

I don't know whether I thought that by attending the trial I could influence its outcome—the way, as a child, I had believed that my simple presence could keep my family safe, somehow, and so had tagged along on countless tedious walks and errands purely to ensure my mother's, or brother's, or father's continued well-being. Or whether I simply could not bear any longer the empty grey light at my window (the sun, after its spectacular awakening, retreated fast behind the too-familiar veil), and the soporific sentences of France's great men.

I rang Frédéric, who was still in bed, and suggested that we go to watch my grandfather being prosecuted. I had foreborne, all those weeks, from ever mentioning this event, but Frédéric registered no surprise at my changed heart.

"It's happening right now?"

"Well, it's beginning now, this morning. It's already begun."

"We could just walk in?"

"I'm not sure. But I'm family, no?"

"But a kid."

"I don't know who I hate more in all this, my grandfather or Marie-José."

"The bitch, for sure."

"Why's that?"

"The old guy's old. And he's family."

"So?"

"Yeah, well."

There was a moment's silence.

"You want me to go with you, is that it?"

"Aren't you curious?"

"Sure, but ... is there a jury? The whole works?"

"I don't think so. There was a lot of talk, y'know, with my parents, a while back, about which court it would be. But Cécile wasn't hurt, not really, so it's not that serious."

"And you say he's pleading guilty?"

"Yep. My grandma doesn't like it."

"So what's to see?"

"How do you mean?"

"There's no freak show, no surprises, nothing fun ... the judges will ask a few questions and..."

"Marie-José is testifying."

"I know. The whole school knows. She's been acting like it makes her into some major movie star or something."

I sniffed. I had not known that everybody knew, and Frédéric had not been friend enough to tell me.

"Look, wouldn't it be more fun to hook up with Sami and Lahou and catch a movie downtown this afternoon? You could get some work done by lunch, and then—"

"Yeah. Thanks, Fred. Never mind."

I decided I would go alone. In conscious imitation of my parents, I dressed up. I braided my hair in a single fat plait, and put on a grey skirt and one of my mother's blouses, a butter-colored one. I wanted to look as grown-up as possible. I wore a raincoat of my mother's, but as I was taller than she, it barely reached my knees. I added, like her, a silk scarf. I considered a pair of her sunglasses the better to disguise my youth, but figured that on so gloomy a day they would only attract attention.

After slipping out with merely a shout to Fadéla—who toiled in some invisible region of the house—I caught the bus into town, and spent the journey trying to gauge whether the other passengers were staring at me.

Walking to the courts, I marvelled that I had ambled the same streets with Thibaud when the asphalt shimmered in the heat and the city dozed; that I had scuffed the same curbs at the heels of my gang in later, danker days; and that here I was again, as if in disguise. What made these three girls—so unlike in demeanor and purpose, so remote, emotionally, one from the other—what made us one and the same? How was I the same girl I had been just the summer before, in Boston, or on Cape Cod? How did I know I was; but more seriously, how could anyone else be sure? What if Eleanor had been sent a counterfeit niece—how would she ever have known?

As I climbed the steps of the courthouse and passed through its forbidding portals, leaving outside the sooty curlicues and arabesques of French bureaucratic architecture for an internal renovation all fluorescence and efficiency, linoleum floors and black vinyl benches upon which to wait—indeed, as I moved from the grand eighteenth-century exterior to such contemporary bleakness I thought, in passing: who would even identify this, photographed in and out, as the same building—I wondered about the guilty who had walked here: the frauds and the thieves and the murderers. The trio of summer bombers, had they survived to injure others, would have walked these steps, the sweet-tempered eighteen-year-old checkout girl along with the two boys, a stranger to her mother. But I wondered, above all, about the Nazi War Criminals, that scattering of men my grandfather's age and older, being brought, so late, to justice. Paul Touvier, first in line, had been arrested and charged earlier that year; but there had been, for as long as I could recall, national grumblings and fussings about these few, our truest emblems of evil, who appeared in the newspapers as cruel-lipped young thugs and again, alongside those photos, as freckled, bespectacled old men in tweed jackets or patterned pullovers, with a tremor of fear in their faces, their features spread and reapportioned and so wasted as to look completely other. I wondered how anybody could be sure enough to condemn them. Their victims, the survivors, pointed their fingers and shouted "Him, it's him!"; but how could they be certain—the outside so altered, the skin flaccid and puckering, the hair gone, the voice quavering, the stance curled into a question mark; and the inside, the dark soul, untouchable and unknown? Like Colonel Chabert, or Martin Guerre—one had to choose, from so few clues (a glance, a trembling chin), to believe or disbelieve, to throw one's faith behind one identity or the other, true or false, villain or victim. I wondered whether it was, in the end, just a choice.

And did this mean, I wondered as I scanned the trial sheets for my grandfather's courtroom (as inconspicuously as possible, my back to the hennaed receptionist, so that all she could see was my plait and my raincoat: I didn't want to be revealed as a child, as his grandchild, for one, and as a minor summarily to be sent home, for another), that in carefully selected circumstances, far from this town where the web of my life was commonly known, I might successfully be reinvented, pretend to be anyone, from anywhere, and be believed? That I might not have to live forever as Sagesse, the daughter in the youngest generation of the LaBasse family, older sister of a drooling mutant, grandchild of a criminal, seemed delicious.

This was a simple realization, to be sure, and a common one—in New York, surrounded by the like-minded, I have come to consider it an American realization—but although in Boston it had hovered in my consciousness, it had never touched me with such clarity as it did in the sandwich-scented corridor of the Palais de Justice. If I decided that the three Sagesses who had walked in front of this building in the past months were not the same girl, then who was to quibble?

If that were so, I countered to myself, if one was many different people, each distinct, then my grandfather could not possibly be prosecuted: the passive, delicate fellow he had become, his brow drawn up in permanent anxiety, bore no relation to the raging blusterer who had pulled the trigger. But the later self had always lived within the earlier, and the two, though separate, were inseparable. And while we, his kin, might not recognize him, it was society—Cé- cile and Marie-Jo and even the lawyer, Rom—who stood outside my grandfather and concurred that he was the same man, that he owned the same clothes and had the same wife and the same dentures, and remained, indisputably, one and the same, however altered he might appear in manner or in temperament.

But what, I wondered, if he had forgotten? Could an amnesiac be reponsible for what had been done in his earlier incarnation? What linked us all our lives, I thought, was memory, fluted and flawed though it might be. Without that—if we, his family, claimed him but he did not know us—would my grandfather still be guilty? Where were the limits of sameness? When could we stop, at last and in relief, being the same person, the person we did not choose or want to be? Or was it, I wondered, adjusting my mother's scarf at my neck and pulling back the heavy swing door to my grandfather's courtroom, feeling the hollowing sensation that my clever thoughts had been circular and for nought, a crude and ineluctable matter of the flesh?
The room was bright and sallow, large, but not as cavernous as I had imagined it. It had no windows, and sat on a scrubby mud-brown carpet. At the far end, slightly raised at a panelled counter, two men and a woman presided, the judges, solemn but unremarkable people no older than my parents. A court reporter typed to the left, a young man with bristly fair hair and an elongated head. I scanned the backs between me and those officials and picked out the trio that was my family, grateful that they did not turn around. Cé- cile did, however; she craned her neck and frowned, and returned to face the voices, her own parents' smooth crania slightly cocked on either side of her.

The first voice belonged to the woman judge. She had been asking a question, although I did not hear it. There was a brief and reverberating silence, followed by a voice I knew, smaller than usual, but deliberate and clear: my grandfather's voice. I turned to find him, at the right of my line of sight, far across the room, and caught him by the characteristic swoop of his arm as it reached to smooth back his hair.

I looked at him, and heard his voice, but not what he said, and felt, just then, a hand on my upper arm. A police officer, in uniform, whispered something in my ear. He did not try to move me. I took in his ovoid shiny face and the bluish swathe of his jaw. I was as if struck deaf; I didn't know whether he wanted me to sit, or to leave, or to identify myself.

"It's my grandfather," I whispered back. I tried to be very quiet, not wanting my parents to sense any commotion or to notice me. The officer said something else. All the while my grandfather's voice was rising and falling, with the drowsy persistence of an August wasp against a window pane. I looked back at him, and he glanced, as if telepathically, at the door and at me, and our eyes met. His eyes, sad as a basset hound's, locked onto mine across all the room's bright distance, and his voice faltered in its rhythms; and I was struck, like a shaft, a physical pain, by the sorrow and the awfulness of it, by the loneliness of the diminished figure in his dark suit, alone on the ocean of brown carpet; and aware that the look that passed between us was one of agonizing recognition: we saw, and knew, each other. Our blood was the same blood, and this, this instant of dreadful mutuality, was the reason that one could never escape one's self. He was my grandfather and would always be, and I felt a terrible pity for him that was love. And as the officer began to tug at my arm, I smiled, a brittle and doubtless tearful smile, but one designed to communicate to my grandfather that after all these months I had forgiven him, and that I understood and accepted what had just passed between us.

I don't know if he saw me smile, because then I blinked, on account of my welling tears, and the officer opened the door (it seemed, after all, that he wanted me to leave), and I slipped out of his grasp and back into the hallway where, suddenly, I could hear properly again—the telephone at the reception and the hennaed woman's nasal greeting; the shuffle and clack of steps in the nearby stairwell; snatches of conversation between a lawyer and her client as they brushed past me ("I really don't think you should say that. And above all, keep calm")—and where I hunched my shoulders and headed for the street.

The trial lasted another day and a half. My grandfather didn't mention to my parents that he had seen me; nor did he broach the subject with me. It made me wonder about that summer night, the night of the crime; and I became convinced that my grandfather, with some inner sense, had seen me then, too. That secret night, with its cool smell of greenery and the lemon scent of Thibaud, the spit of gravel on my back and the soughing sea—I felt as though my grandfather had recognized me there, and that in some way we shared that night's guilt and treachery. If I could forgive him his sin, perhaps he could absolve me of mine. It would be our shared secret.

Thinking this, I felt the warmth run between us again like a current, and I allowed myself to worry about him and his fate. I, who had come home, skipped lunch and changed my clothes, had lain on my bed to read my philosophy books until dinnertime, dozing over them because they were too difficult, almost wondered whether the morning's outing had been only a vivid daydream. My mother returned alone at around six, saying that my father had gone on to the Bellevue, with his parents, to see about some business.

"How'd it go?"

"Fine—I think. Who knows? Your father thought it went well. Your grandfather gave his account, you know, and what with procedure, that took up a lot of time. Then they started with the witnesses—the girl from Paris, first, and then her parents—"

"They weren't even there. What do they know?"

My mother looked surprised. "It's standard. They spoke about the hotel, and your group of friends, the way you kids all hang together—"

"They're not my friends."

My mother shrugged. "More tomorrow. Marie-José tomorrow, I expect."

"Hm."

"Your poor grandfather. I know I've had my ups and downs with him, but if you could've seen him up there—"

"I know."

"You don't, though. You can't imagine. This has broken him. And when you think about it, the life he's had and all he's been through, and still, all he's accomplished ... and now this..." She sighed. "It's no way for a man to be, at his age."

"You don't think they'll send him to prison?"

"What do I know,
poupette
? I hope not."

"Grand'-mère thinks it could kill him."

"Let's hope they don't. I really hope they don't. The strange thing is..."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"What's strange?"

"Nothing. It's just your father."

"What about him?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Maman—"

"I just get the impression—it's very odd—that he'd prefer it."

"Prefer what?"

"Prison."

I thought about this for a moment. "That's ridiculous."

"Oh, I don't mean he would admit it. He might not even know it. And maybe I'm just wrong."